


He Definitely Fucks

by NXTDNDIMHO



Series: NXTDNDIMHO [7]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), WWE NXT - Fandom, World Wrestling Entertainment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23135329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NXTDNDIMHO/pseuds/NXTDNDIMHO
Summary: NXT Wrestling Fan is a podcast about falling in love with wrestling. It follows NXT starting 22 May 2013. It's a good show made by lovely people.This episode did not have William Regal on commentary and was poorer for it. My reflection on this lack fired my singular obsession.This work came after Episode XVI: #RusevThings.
Series: NXTDNDIMHO [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1627138





	He Definitely Fucks

The other day, my wife and I were deciding what to do with an evening. We had recently gotten Hulu and she indicated checking out an episode of Smack Down. We quickly realized what a fucking mistake that was and I pulled up the most recent episode of NXT [insert date]. My major take-away Finn Bálor, who is hauntingly beautiful and bears a striking resemblance to Andy Serkis. Her major takeaway was that, “The acting is about as good as it is in porn,” which I think is a fair if uninspired take. The through-line between both genera is pretty clear: they both feature people who are clearly skilled physical performers being asked to give traditional line reads, and often to give them on rather short notice and probably in as few takes as possible because, while that sort of set dressing can add a significant amount of catharsis to the outcome of the performance, it is not usually what the performers got into the business to do. I suspect that under similar circumstances, dancers would give similarly wooden performances. Furthermore, while TV News Anchors and Improv or Sketch actors would be solid on the mic or in promos, it would be far less engaging to watch them bone.

This, however, brought me straight back NXT WF Episode IX: Regalmania, and the interview featuring the D&D Party and William Regal together as a Triple Threat. I think it’s safe to say that there is a particular tone and cadence that wrestlers fall into, a performative gruffness that permeates most wrestlers at, in my experience, most levels of competition. I had been spacing off a bit, watching that segment for the show, as Neville and Graves fell comfortably into how wrestlers are “supposed” to sound. I snapped to attention as soon as William Regal opened his mouth. His delivery is smooth, natural, charming. He conveys intensity but also ease, and his lines were much denser and tighter than the monologues delivered by either of his allies. It was evident from that thirty seconds of tape why he was such a force as a commentator: William Regal’s greatest talent is his speech.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably state that it hadn’t been my intention to do a build of William Regal. I only added him to the project board in my office after I started on his sheet, because checking things off lists is pleasing to me. However, as my wife and I were watching that recent episode of NXT, I noticed that the commentary was a lot lower in the audio mix than it is in the 2013 episodes. It was only after I noticed how weird it was that I realized that I didn’t miss it, and that the commentators seemed amateurish, that their delivery felt scripted and stilted, bringing to mind Rifftrax Live performances, when the camera cuts to the riffers as they riffle through their scripts, dulling, though not quite breaking, the illusion of spontaneity. I realized that William Regal is so good at what he does that you miss him when he’s gone.

But of course, we all know that William Regal is amazing and, more importantly, definitely fucks. Y’all came to hear about why I made him into a Wizard.

In my piece on Cesaro, I presented a formulation that placed Fighter on one end of a sliding scale of kinds of mastery and Wizard on the other. The implication is that both are specifically focused on honing their craft, but this craft lies in very different spheres. If a fighter is designed to be a sturdy, functional multitool that could be judiciously applied to most situations, then a Wizard has an app for everything, an incredibly wide array of tools at their disposal, many of which are highly effective at exactly the thing they are designed for. While this is the case with most spell casters, the most engaging feature of a Wizard’s advancement is their ever-expanding spellbook. The chore that comes with creating a high-level Wizard (or any spellcaster, but Wizard is particularly odious) comes from building out that list of spells. I have often found that the easiest and best way to accomplish this is to find some way to focus the decision making; a couple of features that define the fun of this character interacting in the world. This act of translating the fun of engaging with William Regal – or any other wrestler - into the fun of him fucking shit up in your fictional fantasy world is the reason this series exists.

Onomancy is a fairly recent addition to the play-test material for 5th Edition. However, as is usually the case in a game system designed around mechanizing pastiche, the idea at the sub-class’s core is well trod. The word Onomancy traditionally describes a type of fortune telling that uses the subject’s name as a means of divination. For our purposes, however, it is being used to describe the idea of gaining a measure of power over other people by use of True Names. I think my first interaction with Naming was in the _Inheritance Cycle_ , a series of dragon-centric fantasy novels written by Christopher Paolini, started when he was still a teenager and published between 2002 and 2011. No film adaptations has been attempted and I will brook no arguments to the contrary. I’ve heard a lot of criticism of the series for being highly derivative and pretty much just Fantasy Star Wars, but I was in middle and high school reading them and they are fine. Naming in this series is used as a sort of compulsion, forcing the will of the Namer onto the Named, making them act in a particular way until such a time that the Named has changed their character so much as to have also changed their Secret, True Name, which is a neat idea, even if it’s stolen. I think the more common modern touchstone for Naming is Patrick Rothfuss’s hitherto unfinished _King Killer_ _Chronicles_ , whose first novel called _The Name of the Wind_ , because Pat is enchanted by the idea of Naming. In a conversation with _Campaign_ and _One Shot_ ’s James D’Amato currently housed within a Secret Archive that has been rumored to exist for Patreon Backers, Patrick talked about his fascination with fantasy magic systems and defined the continuum between Descriptive and Evocative systems. Descriptive systems are a sort of science, with rules that make them right and clever. Evocative systems don’t give a shit about your rules and _feel_ right. The art of Naming, the means by which you manipulate or entreat a force or object by naming it, is a strongly Evocative system. These examples along with numerous other examples that those examples are stealing from create the tradition from with Onomancy has been adapted into _Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition._

After completing the bulk of William Regal’s sheet, I had a major crisis of confidence. Was this correct? Would Regal not be better served as a Bard or a Sorcerer, something that better centered his Charisma instead of some sort of Intelligence? Is William Regal smart? I think I have to conclude that, yes, William Regal is if not smart, then he is canny. William Regal is clever in the ways that he applies language to accomplishes his ends. His major role in NXT as we know it is to put over the wresters who are currently wrestling. I remember a match from several weeks ago. I think Corey Graves was involved, but I can’t be sure because all that I remember is one wrestler slapping the other across the chest repeatedly while William Regal talked about how, “It may not look like it, but those chops are wearing his opponent down. You’ve never felt it, but every one of those hits damages the ribs, making it hard to breath, making it hard to keep fighting.” I had been credulous. _Why are these svelte burly bois slapping each other in the chest?_ I wondered. Then William Regal told me, and my disbelief was immediately suspended. _Well, if Regal says this is a good move, than it must be a good move,_ I thought, and got back into the match. This brought into focus the magic of William Regal on commentary to me. It doesn’t matter if what he said is true, only that you believe that it is true and are carried along by its effects. He is both entirely of and entirely contrary to the core tenant of Onomancy. His language is Descriptive, but descriptive of the reality that he is working to Evoke. He doesn’t just see True Names, but he sees that True Names are only a deeper sort of fiction.

With this understanding as a guide, I picked a number of spells from the Enchantment school in order to illustrate how he manages perception, a few Illusions for fun, and then filled out the list with spells that were physical rather than elemental in nature, because we ought never forget that William Regal is very much a man of the world who can reach beyond it to do wonderous things, and he definitely fucks.

A bit of clean up

-This is the first one of these in which I’ve created an original Background. This is in no small part because I really want to bring to the front the fact that Regal began his wrestling career actually working a challenge ring at carnivals, which is wild. I sort of smashed Folk Hero, Criminal, and Entertainer together a bit, and that’s what came out. It granted him proficiency in Performance and Deception, one language, and Tinker’s Tools (stemming from probably gaining a basic familiarity with all the basics of traveling, taking up and pulling down booths and tents, making simple repairs, that sort of thing). Rustic Contacts is pretty heavily truncated from how it might appear in the book, but is meant to evoke a sort of kinship and ability to socialize with or get a job from the wonderers of the world.

-I have an entire essay in me about the use of language in D&D, how it’s poorly implemented and not terribly engaging and never really comes up unless people are being a dick to eachother. This isn’t that essay. There’s probably another one about how the idea that there is a Common Language, and that the one language everyone knows is also the Human language, is pretty colonialist and a bit uncomfortable when you start to think about the ways that some races stem from cultural caricatures and… look, this isn’t that essay either. There are two interesting things about the languages I selected for the sheet:

+William Regal’s accent is if not necessarily fake than definitely inflected. He’s from Lancashire (NW England) and sounds like it, but he’s learned how to speak in an accent that is more likely to be accepted as “Proper” English because classism. That’s why “Posh Common” is one of his languages.

+Rhetoric is not a language so much as it is a way to use language. In case in the above paragraph didn’t make it clear, I have frustrations with the way that language is presented in D&D and have tried to find some workarounds so that everything that ends up on a character’s sheet is useful, either in describing something about their past or (and preferably) giving that character a distinct way to interact with the world. Regal’s power comes from the way that he employs language, an in particular his position of earned authority as he imparts insight to the audience. In more explicit rhetorical terms, he leverages his ethos to subvert what your logical mind is telling you in order to create the pathos required for the match to be effective.

-William Regal has a lot of pets, y’all. Like, I think the only addition I made was the velociraptor; the rest are just magical fantasy equivalents. According to his Wikipedia page, “He once quipped that he owns so many pets because, ‘Humans disgust me.’”

-We have a lot of fun saying, “Oh, William Regal fucks,” and if we’re honest, the following statement has very little to do with that as an inter-community meme. He and his wife have been married since 1986, or since they were 18. They met when he was working for the carnival as a 17-year-old and it’s very sweet.


End file.
